Analysis Of Gazan Casualties In Operation Protective Edge: As Of August 6th

An Aussie immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave is founder and managing editor of Israellycool, one of the world's most popular pro-Israel blogs (and the one you are currently reading)
He is a happy family man, and a lover of steak, Australian sports and girlie drinks

As with the other lists, this one had many duplicates, which our reader who performed the analysis identified. Although, by his own admission, there may be more he missed.

Our reader also noticed something else striking: this list as of now has been dramatically changed. Names, spelling, and so on are different from the previous lists. Barely anything is consistent, and the fact that no one has reported on this is disturbing. You cannot during the war present one list and then after major confrontations present a new one. Which one was accurate? Why were there these changes?

Once again, the analysis indicates how even those numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry – which are clearly problematic and biased against Israel – do not support claims that Israel is targeting civilians or indiscriminately killing them, and do support IDF claims that we tried to pinpoint the terrorists.

The highest demographic category of those killed is young males of fighting age (18-28) – 28% (73% x 38%)

Over 37% of those killed have been males of age 18-38 (i.e including others who could very well be combatants)

When compared to the overall population of Gaza, a disproportionately high percentage of young to middle age males have been killed

Despite comprising approximately 50% of the population, the percentage of women killed is 20%.

Despite comprising approximately 50% of the population, the percentage of children under 14 killed is approximately 14%.

From a statistical point of view, our reader notes there is less than a 1% chance of the IDF killing people at random.

This result is unprecedented in modern warfare, considering Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.

Notes on the analysis from our reader:

I have done two separate Chi-Squared tests.

The first one is comparison of expected casaulties based on Gender alone. So basically looking at Expected and Observed values. I also have done a second one based on comparison of age brackets and gender. The main point is that the first test had to exclude unidentified populations and the second test I ran had to exclude both unidentified population subset and the unknown age subsets. So both of these look at at only subsets, because you cannot run these tests on population subsets where the expected value would be 0, as you would expect everyone to be identified and age known (at least within an 10-20 year range).

But both show exactly the same thing, that there is less than a 1% chance of the IDF killing people at random, assuming this random distribution followed the general population proportions. Actually it is less than a 0.0001% chance of the IDF doing that. It is clear that the population segments targeted was specific, in most cases. Though the numbers don’t show when Hamas terrorists use a person as a human shield.

But better than this less than 0.0001% chance is just looking at the absolutes. Women who represent ~50% of the population of Gaza, made up 353 of the casualties in the operation so far. Men between the ages of 18-28, which I believe represents less than 10% of the total Gaza population, represents 489 of the casualties (that they admit).

Another point to consider is Gaza has a natural death rate of 3.09/1000, meaning that over a year, from every 1000 people, 3.09 die. So if you upscale that to the 1.8 million there that are 5562 dying from natural causes. Which is around 15 people/per day, or about 450 people for the entire operation. If you look the number of casualties whose age is unknown (male 252 & female 67), and the total unidentified 128, that sums up to 447 casualties. Although this proves nothing, I can’t help but feel suspicious when I see these numbers matching up so well. It would be a clever way to increase the casualty count, with even the most eagle eyed missing it.

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